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December 11th, 2013

December 11th, 2013 by Franklin Habit

(It’s going to take a moment to get to the yarn content today. Stick with me.)

It’s football season. I need not have to tell you this if you live in the United States. It is impossible to live in the United States during football season and not know it is football season.

I don’t especially care that it is football season.

My father, a native Pennsylvanian, rooted for the Steelers in a laconic and slapdash way; but we never gathered around the television to cheer. He believed that spectator sports were a waste of a healthy body. If you could run and jump and throw, you didn’t watch other people do it, you did it yourself.

My partner Tom shares my lack of interest. It’s one thing that brought us together. Here in the Midwest it’s difficult to socialize for half the year if you don’t want to watch football. “Come on over! We’re getting together to watch the game!” the neighbors will say. If you admit you’d rather not watch the game, they thereafter regard you as a person of suspicious character, telling their children to come indoors when they see you on the sidewalk.

Tom doesn’t care about football but he does enjoy socializing. So he often finds himself surrounded by jolly enthusiasts in colorful jerseys. Just this weekend, some of his friends, who had ties to Ohio State University, invited him to hang out at a sports bar during the game with the University of Michigan. Tom is a get-along guy, a real social chameleon. He happily put on the bright red shirt and the necklace made of buckeyes and settled in for the duration.

The trouble was that, like me, he not only does not care about the sport–he doesn’t understand it. We both know what a “touchdown” is: when the ball has made it to one end of the field and somebody does a funky little dance, his team gets points. Beyond that, we have no idea what’s going on.

I could try to learn the rules, I suppose, but a brain has only so much capacity. I’m afraid that if I commit to memory what “first and ten” means, it will push a piece of vital knowledge out of my other ear and suddenly I’ll forget how to do a Kitchener stitch.